Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage,” is a peculiar novel/audio file combination that challenges conventional perceptions of art and meaning. Like most presumably do, I originally misread the title, thinking that “massage” read “message.” This lead me to assume that the theme of this reading was to understand how certain medias can portray or even misconceive the purpose of a piece of art. However, the “massage” refers to how the media massages parts of a person’s sensory. This is something that I really only fully understood once listening to everything, aside from just reading the excerpt.

As I read the assigned passages, I admittedly became bored, as I do with most assigned readings. I had trouble keeping focus or grasping onto some motivation to stay attentive. Not to imply that any part of it was disinteresting, but as someone who struggles with ADHD and long readings, it was a routine I’m not unfamiliar with.  However, once I plugged in my headphones and began the audio files, everything was clearer. The recordings stat out with white noise and chatter that seems almost uncomfortable at first, but then there are subtle transitions into sounds that are more like vibrations, sounds that almost force you into a certain state of mind. By this point of the assignment, I was already beginning to feel my eyes grow heavy, but the sounds that were over and under lapping the speaker’s voice eased me into a more relaxed but alert position, ready to receive. The sometimes overwhelming white noise forced me to listen closer for what the speaker had to say; at some points, I was listening very closely and then all of a sudden the extra vibrations were gone and whatever the speaker was saying just at its absence was strongly emphasized.

After being forced into almost a meditative state of awareness and getting a glimpse of what McLuhan intended for viewers to experience, I wonder now, what the power of this technique/usage can be. How could it be utilized of even manipulated to endure certain types of thinking or understanding among the audience? It also sparked an interest in myself to find out if anyone else since McLuhan has attempted something so unorthodox and experimentally powerful and how effective they might have been in do such.